The European Space Agency (ESA), in collaboration with the Space Office of Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), launched October 9th, in Lisbon, a technology transfer programme in Portugal, named National Technology Transfer Initiative in Portugal (PTTI). Its main objective is “to strengthen the competitiveness of the Portuguese space industry and promote technological innovation by facilitating the transfer of existing space technologies to non-space markets”, says Carlos Cerqueira, PTTI Coordinator at Instituto Pedro Nunes, the entity invited by ESA to manage and implement the programme.
According to the PTTI Coordinator, fulfilling PTTI’s objectives encompasses opening calls for Feasibility Studies and Demonstrators to, respectively, fund the development of business plans and technical feasibility studies of the application of a space technology to a non-space market, and to fund prototypes and technology tests applied to a non-space market.
These calls and ESA’s funds distributed to winning entities are fundamentally directed to Portuguese companies working and developing space technologies, somehow responding to funding difficulties identified in these kind of activities, but also to universities and their research labs.
In addition, PTTI may add value to the country. “The Portuguese investment in ESA programmes has a spin-off factor of 2, meaning that for each million Euro of governmental support through ESA, the Portuguese space sector companies on average attained an additional turnover of 1 million Euros, says Carlos Cerqueira citing the «Survey of the Economic Impact of Portugal’s Participation in ESA from 2000 to 2009» (Clama Consulting).
More information available at http://ptti.ipn.pt/ and http://www.slideshare.net/xysto/ptti-09-10-2012 .